Darkborn
The story
In the city of Minhorne, Darkborn and Lightborn live side by side, never meeting, divided by a powerful mages' curse that makes daylight lethal to the Darkborn and darkness lethal to the Lightborn. They are divided, too, by their acceptance of magic and technology, their politics, their religion, and their views of the proper conduct of men and women.
An act of necessary succor brings Darkborn physician Balthasar Hearne to the deadly attention of agents of a new and unrecognized enemy of both Darkborn and Lightborn. His aristocratic wife, Telmaine, is forced to use magical abilities she has all her life kept hidden, to protect her husband and her children. And Ishmael di Studier, mage and social outcast, who has spent decades defending his borders home from the marauding Shadowborn, now finds himself engaged against an even more dangerous enemy.
First chapter, at the publishers' site. The story continues in the other two novels of the trilogy, Lightborn (due out May 2010), and Shadowborn (due out May 2011).
Editions
Darkborn is published by ROC, May 5, 2009
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I had this idea, you see ...
I had never envisioned writing fantasy, much as I enjoy reading fantasy, since my educational background is science-heavy. But several years ago I was reading a fantasy novel in which the whole light-dark motif was rather too front and centre, and in a fit of irritation began to pick at the edges. Out of which came the image of a city divided by a sunrise and sunset, and a house with a paper wall through which a man and woman who have never met engage in a long, deep friendship. But why the division - oh, a curse. That was easy! Brief sweet sense of liberation from the laws of physics - I can do anything! - followed by the swift and chastening recognition of the iron-clad laws of dramatic and magical logic; I would have to live with the consequences of my own bright ideas.
Page created April 2009. Last modified May 4, 2009. Alison Sinclair